[RFC-004]Comment-12

Organization: Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science

Dear Sirs,

We have implemented a DODS server (nowadays called OPeNDAP) at our institute at ETH about 3 years ago. We used the server within a small group of atmospheric chemistry-transport modelers to share our output for easier comparison of the results. The server absolutely served our needs which were not very high, since we had only one type of data sets to serve in netCDF format. I have realized that problems occur with other netCDF files but I guess that an update of the server (ours is quite old) would solve that.

I had also tried to implement the IDL client (with the idea that all modellers could use the same IDL interface) but until recently (my last tries were about 1 year ago) I partly failed as the client was clearly not in a good shape. Moreover, there were only few binaries available for different platforms and installation of the source files was close to impossible at that time. Actually, we had only managed to install the client within 2 (both using the same SUN Solaris environment) out of the 6 groups involved in the project despite clear installation instructions I had sent to everybody.

I have heard rumours that the client may be updated substantially be the end of this year, but on the other hand, the previous update had not really turned it into a reliable interface. This IDL client obviously was and maybe still is not a high priority, which is a petty.

Another problem with the server (some 2 years ago) was that the user could not easily obtain information about the contents of a directory. In other words, the URL of the data set had to be known exactly before it could be accessed. As far as I know this has also changed but I don’t know the current status.

In any case, we would clearly welcome if OPeNDAP would turn into a community-wide standard.